Color
blind

Sometimes
alertness is just a state of being. Occasionally
it requires a bit of prodding with a sharp stick.
Guess who just got their wake-up call.

Over
the past 25 years, no issue has had a greater
impact on the colored stone business than that
of enhancements. And now, what's gone around
for us coloreds has just bit whitey in the ass,
in the form of an announcement that the color
of near-colorless diamonds can be improved by
an undetectable enhancement. Yep, the future
is now for the diamond business, and ya know
what? I know who's holdin' that stick.
Let me give you a hint: he has horns and…
uh… it's more like a trident. Whitey,
welcome to hell.

Bigotry

Yes, we coloreds
have been guilty of stupidity. For 25 years, diamond
folks sat and laughed, and rightly so: "Look at
them, how ignorant they are. They figure nobody knows
better. But we know. And so does John Q. Public. Which
is why he likes diamond better."

The
trouble with ignorance is that it's catching, something
even a lilly-white karbon klansman kan pick up. Several
weeks ago, one pillar of whiteydom, Lizard King, Inc.,
stood up tall and told one and all: "Ain't
nothin' wrong with changin' color. I am a
lizard and so I can be changin' color. B'sides,
you coloreds do it all the time." Yep. He looked
the world straight in the eye and said that changing
a diamond's color wasn't a problem, least
so long as the lab folks couldn't tell the difference.

The trouble with
ignorance is that it's catching, something even
a lilly-white karbon klansman kan pick up.

Now I'll
pause here for those who are busy cutting their desks
into pencil-sized fragments of rage to genuflect a moment.
You're absolutely right. What's incredible
is not that someone is reducing the color of diamonds.
No sir. What is mind-boggling is that someone had the
moxie to declare bald-faced that we need not care. To
quote Frank Zappa: "Great googly-moogly!"

This
is obviously a clear-cut case of testicular elephantiasis,
something not seen since Prince changed his name to
that weird character. But when I look at the Lizard
King, I don't see colossal cojones. No sir.
Despite that reptilian brain of his, I think the lizard
knew better. Which I figure was why he told folks what
he was plannin' to do. Jus' ta try the idea
out, sorta, kinda, mey-beee.

Everybody's
got a price, and we've just found out what it is
for this fly-catcher. The whole thing reminds me of
the story where a man approaches a woman and asks if
she will sleep with him for a million dollars. She immediately
agrees. "Okay," he continues, "will you
sleep with me for ten dollars?" Shocked, the woman
blurts out: "Of course not! What do you think I
am?" "We already know what you are,"
he answers, "now it's just a question of determining
the price."

This is obviously a clear-cut
case of testicular elephantiasis, something not seen
since Prince changed his name to that weird character.

Been there,
cooked that

There is no
question that we in the colored stone business brought
our current woes upon ourselves. We cooked and we grilled
and we microwaved and we waxed and we lubed, all the
while talking ourselves into believing our own jive-ass
bulls@#t lick about how we were just keepin' on
keepin' on, just doing what Mother Nature taught
us.

Our geuda sapphires went from the fish tank to Fifth
Avenue, and what happened? Prices for blues haven't
nudged up a nickel since 1980. Rubies? Lookee
there. The flux-healin' face-lifts we foisted on
the public have forced prices so low that even synthetic
producers are going tits up. We warred to wax jade,
and now waste both time and beaucoup coin identifying
the B variety. And we told ourselves that sticking our
emeralds up on the rack for a quick lube job was a necessary
part of the biz. To what end? Our greased greens
are so unpopular today that Colombia's money-launderin'
dope dealers are said to be working on a novel inventory
reduction program – you guessed it – a smokable
emerald. Their new slogan? "Colombian emerald –
It's the ree-chest kind."

Tough love

Some lessons
come hard. It does matter what we do to a stone. But
it matters even more when we fail tell people that the
gemstone they are buying is not the virgin birth, but
instead a test-tube baby. When we fail this most basic
test of honesty, John Q. Public sees in our shenanigans
not business as usual, but more business as screwsual.

John Q. Public sees
in our shenanigans not business as usual, but more
business as screwsual.

Slow learners

Over the
past 25 years, the diamond industry has had a front-row
center seat to see how not to do business. We coloreds
learned our lesson. It took 25 years, but we learned
our lesson. Gotta come clean with folks. Gotta tell
people what we're doin'. Today whitey needs
to do some learnin' from us. See, whitey can even
learn from coloreds.

Yes,
we in the colored stone business have been whores. And
now we have company. Black, white, yellow, red, green,
blue, color don't matter none. Just like everybody
who's ever been stuck in this human skin, we're
all dumb sometimes.

So
here's my advice to whitey – don't be
makin' the same mistake as us. No sir. Tell the
Lizard King you don't need no snake oil, don't
need to speak with no forked tongue. Tell him you don't
need no face-liftin' tummy-tuckin' thigh-suckin'
booby boostin' snow jobs. Just look that lizard
straight in the eye and tell him: "No sortas,
kindas or mey-bees. Ain't nothin' like the
real thing. Carbon copies? No thanks."

Author's
Afterword

Published
in GemKey Magazine under the title "From
the Laser Drill into the Fire" (1999,
Vol. 1, No. 6, Sept.-Oct.), this was installment
#6 of my Digital
Devil column. This article as published was edited
quite a bit. The text above is my original.

Reader's responses

The following responses were sent in to GemKey
Magazine regarding this column.

You've
really done it this time, Dick

Editor,
Your current edition of GemKey contains
an article that is shocking in its blatant racist
perspective. I know such manifestos are out there
and recent violent events in Los Angeles have
reminded us that racial hatred is alive and well.
However, I have never received into my home a
publication that contains this kind of retrograde,
hateful racism. I cannot begin to convey the shock
I felt as I read Richard Hughes' column on
colored stones ['From the Laser Drill into
the Fire', Vol. 1, Issue 6]. Does he really
think that was funny? What is amusing about discrimination
and second-class citizen status? Where is Hughes
from? South Africa? It is hard to believe that
an American could not be aware of how repulsive
and harmful such sentiments are.

And where are your heads? Don't you have
oversight at your magazine? Your little blurb
about "not expressing the opinions of the
magazine" is pathetic and untrue. Would you
print anti-Semitic sentiments from Hitler disguised
as a column on gem stones? I don't think
so, and there is no reason to print Hughes'
racism just because he is on your staff.

You owe your readers a really strongly-worded
apology, removal of Hughes from your staff, and
a promise to never let this kind of thing happen
again.

I await your reply, both to us by email and in
print in the magazine.

Joyous Jewels
Santa Monica, California

Editor,
I am especially appreciative of the high-quality
of the writing style exhibited by your magazine.
Trade publications are almost uniformly chock-full
of information, but not always so readable. The
unfortunate exception is Mr. Richard Hughes. While
I neither doubt his expertise nor (usually) disagree
with his opinions, I find his writing style is
almost offensively bad – not for the callous
use of the racial metaphor, but for his amateurishly
awkward execution of it, and even more so for
his appallingly unfunny witticisms and pointless
"folksy" hyperbole. If you're going
to use his work, the least you should do is edit
it down to the 30 percent which is usably factual.
Spare us all.

Henry A. Janowitz
Los Angeles, California

Editor,
Richard Hughes' article in Vol. 1, Issue
6 ('From the Laser Drill into the Fire')
was very realistic, and a prime concern of the
general diamond industry. I can relate to his
sentiments and displeasure with the tampering
of "natural" gems versus treated gems
and diamonds.

The diamond industry is cannibalizing its integrity
and distinguished profession via the enhancement
process. The public is losing confidence in genuine
gems and diamonds and I fear that the end loser
is the manufacturer and jeweler. Technology is
prostituting the gem trade as well as undermining
the public's confidence. Who will be hurting
more, the public or the industry? Can we still
truly say, "a rose is a rose?"

Thank you, Richard for your article. I hope the
industry wakes up!

Mary Sayad
New Jersey

Editor,
I look forward to each edition of GemKey, and I read it cover to cover. It's informative,
and there are some really entertaining articles.
I did think "From the Laser Drill into the
Fire" by Richard Hughes was in poor taste,
however.

Jerry Alexander

RWH
responds:

Let me state clearly that I
have no problem with the comments of Henry Janowitz
and Jerry Alexander. Taste is a personal matter
and I understand and sympathize with differences
of opinion on such questions. Every four years,
the United States goes through an exercise in
self-flagellation which only proves one thing
– the taste of one half the population differs
from the other.

The comments of Joyous Jewels, however, are just
a wee bit over the top, and so here's my
thoughts.

This is not the first complaint I have received
alluding to racism in my writings, either direct
or indirectly (for readers who are interested,
see the letter which follows 'Death
of the Thai Ruby' and my response in
'Life
During Wartime'). Let me briefly restate
a few things I discussed in "Life During
Wartime."

My sins are many, but racism
or cultural chauvinism (inter or intra or whatever)
are not among them. Raised in America, I am
a mixture of Scottish, English, Swedish, Jewish and French-German
ancestry, but close to half my life has been
spent in Asia. My wife, Wimon, is Thai-Chinese,
my daughter, Billie, is half Chinese and half
of my mixed ethnic bag and is named after an
African-American blues singer, Billie Holiday
(primarily because I fell in love with her melancholy
song, 'Strange Fruit,' about a white
lynching of a black man in the American South).

Yes, racism is an important problem. Having spent
much of my life in a country where I was a minority
and having suffered the leers and catcalls for
having the audacity to date (and marry) someone
outside my own race, I think it fair to say that
I have more than a long-distance understanding
of the subject.

It is a tragedy that the racism charge is so overused
in America today that many do not even understand
its meaning. For evidence, we need look no further
than the Joyous Jewels letter, where the writer(s)
saw racism in a column having absolutely nothing
to do with race. Such comments display a distressing
ignorance of the term. Let's look to the
dictionary for help:

Racism:

a belief or doctrine that
inherent differences among the various human
races determine cultural or individual achievement,
usually involving the idea that one's own
race is superior.

a policy, system of government,
etc., based on such a doctrine.

hatred or intolerance of
of another race or races.

In light of the above definitions,
I think we can safely stow away the racism complaint.
But there are always some for whom one has to
connect the dots. Thus let me explain a little
further:

In "Carbon Copies"
('From the Laser Drill into the Fire'),
the terms "whitey" and "coloreds"
were used in a metaphorical sense. For much
of recent history, people of color have been
placed in a subservient role to whites (an historic
fact). Similarly, the colored stone business
has played a subservient role to that of diamonds
over much of this century. But just as whites
can learn from people of color, similarly the
diamond business (read: whitey) too can learn
from the colored stone people (read: coloreds).
Some readers may disagree with my choice of
metaphor or even find it in poor taste, but
to call me racist is just plain silly. Even
a casual reading of the column should make clear
that I am identifying myself with the coloreds,
not whitey.

A
couple years ago I sent out a general announcement
regarding this web site, saying something to
the effect of "…beware, make the sign
of the cross, for the Devil is coming…" An
Israeli friend of mine wrote back, warning that,
if I
wanted to avoid problems, I should not stray
into areas of religion. My reply to him was
simple:
no.

I
went on to explain that my message had nothing
whatsoever to do with religion. But most important,
even if it did, I would not shy away from such
discussions, if for no other reason than that,
in a free society, one should be free to discuss
any subject freely. To do otherwise is to follow
the path that leads towards censorship and the
type of death sentence imposed by the Persian
mullahs on Salman Rushdie.

Ping!
Suddenly the dots connected and my friend understood.

Similarly,
to those who would have me avoid using language
that some might misconstrue as being "racist,"
I say simply: no.

I
will not write down to the level of imbeciles,
nor those who pretend to
be for
the
purpose of nailing themselves to someone else's
cross.

Unfortunately,
what was lost in all of this bluster and bombast
was the issue at hand – namely how
a company placed its desire for profit above
the interests of both the jewelry and consumer
communities.
Judging from the printed response to the above
column, the only person who seemed to get it
was
Mary Sayad. Everyone else stumbled around in
a metaphoric haze. In this sense, the column
was
a failure, and that is my only regret.

Richard Hughes
8 March, 2000

Postscript: For those who are still interested in diamonds,
shortly after writing "Carbon Copies"
(and long before I saw any of the reader response),
I penned another piece on the same subject ('Fun
Down Under').

Reader's
responses.And a few more…

Dick
Hughes anti-Semitic too…?Dick
Hughes, truly is, what we call in Hebrew, slightly
odd. He says and writes things in an unusual,
sometimes tasteless, sometimes harsh way, but
never the less, usually important.

But to write about him as Joyous Jewels did:

"Would you print anti-Semitic
sentiments from Hitler disguised as a column
on gem stones? I don't think so, and there
is no reason to print Hughes' racism just
because he is on your staff… You owe your
readers a really strongly-worded apology, removal of Hughes from your staff, and a promise to
never let this kind of thing happen again."

Well,friends, Hitler did not write the super epos, Ruby & Sapphire – Dick Hughes
did. Hitler Wrote, Mein Kampf, predicting
and planning the killing of a third of my tribe,
and many other millions of homosexuals, blacks,
gypsies, retards, Catholic Priests etc…

Anybody
who knows Dick knows that he is not a racist.
I, as a Jew, have always been treated by him as
an equal, and I have never felt any anti-Semitic
air from him (and, believe me, I know when there
is one around).

But
then, after reading Joyous Jewelscomments,
a terrible thought crossed my mind. Am I the only
Jew he treats well, the one he keeps in order
to prove that he is OK like those famous institutions
which used to keep one Jew, one black and one
Chinese to prove that they are not racist?

And
as a methodical gem dealer, I started checking
his books and articles. I knew from the start
that something was wrong… but I could not pinpoint
it. And then it hit me!

What is this sentence so popular with Dick –
"The price of wisdom is above Rubies?"
When in the name of all gems are rubies mentioned in the Bible at all.

So
I took my Hebrew Bible (written in the original
language in which it was written, Hebrew) and
there in Job 28:18 as I thought, in the Hebrew
Bible it is definitely written: "the price of
wisdom is above Pninim (and any kid in
Israel will tell you that Pninim are pearls and
not rubies.

And
I started running through the entire Holy Bible
as if to join the diamond rush or, to put it into
Dick's words, the ruby rush.

Proverbs 3:15 Hebrew: "she
is more precious than pearls."
English translation: "she
is more precious than rubies."Proverbs 8:11 Hebrew: "…for
wisdom is better than pearls."
English "…for
wisdom is better than rubies."Proverbs 31:10 Hebrew: "A
woman of valor who can find for her price is
far above pearls…"English: "…for
her price is far above rubies."

And
the same in Job mentioned above.

This
was my definite proof of Dick being an anti-Semitic.
Yes, he is using the English translation of the
Bible and not the Hebrew one, so he can ignore
us, the original tribe, chosen people etc…

And
then I knew I had him, he is promoting his rubies on our account, he is a clear rubysemitic!!!

Just
before I fell asleep, I got to the last place
where my Hebrew Bible mentions Pearls: Lamentations
Chapter 4 and it reads in Hebrew: "…they
were more ruddy in body than pearls, their
polishing was of sapphire…"

More
ruddy than pearls? Since when are pearls
red? I could not sleep the whole night running
through all references, including the unique section
in my book, The Dealer's Book of Gems
and Diamonds, where a whole chapter is devoted
to the Breast Plate of the Holy Priest…

So
why in the name of all oysters do we Hebrew speakers
think today that "Pninim" are pearls and not rubies?
I really don't know. All I know, is that I almost
accused dear old Dick of a crime he never committed.

While
looking at what Joyous Jewels are asking for,
I realized that something is very wrong with the
way they are trying to shut up a legitimate speaker,
and remove him. Next thing they'll ask to do is
to burn his books, not unlike the Crystal Night,
when other books were burnt.

Careful
you people, slow down your accusations…

Where
is "I do not agree with what you say but
I will die protecting your right to say it"
which is the basis of the freedom of speech and
democracy?

The
only thing I can accuse Dick Hughes of is that
he wrote the best book ever written on rubies
and sapphires, even better than my chapters!

Mopping
up

Hi Dick,
I've
read and heard much criticism of your "racist"
piece, and from personal observation and experience
I don't see what all the fuss is about. Racism
is an ugly reality on planet earth. I detest it.
But people have got to lighten up here.

I'm
Norwegian and Russian, and I was raised with a
solid "all men are created equal" ethic.
My daughter is half Thai, and her mother's
skin color is well dark enough to be stuck in
the "colored" category by many who feel
the need to make such distinctions.

And
yes, I have to say it, I have several, in fact
many "colored" friends. Indian, Arab,
African, Afro American, Hispanic, Sri Lankan,
Thai etc. etc. Between us, we don't have
a problem with racism.

In
my college days I was a cultural transplant, a
misfit. I hung out predominantly with about a
dozen Afro American and a few African continental
students. They called each other "nigger"
frequently. I read Afro-American poetry with them
and it was full of the "N" word. Eventually
they called me nigger and I called them nigger
and we all loved each other.

Ten
years in Thailand and I know racism well. Farang does loosely translate into "nigger,"
and we certainly know when it is being used as
such, although on the Thai scale, we are mostly
considered high-class niggers. But niggers none
the less. When I go to Thai national parks or
historical sites, I pay five times the entry fee
that Thais pay. The guy from Singapore in front
of me pays the Thai price because he has an Asian
face. I'm the nigger.

I've
said all this to establish that I do have some
sensitivity to what racism is, and is not. Your
piece was not racist. Your style can be criticized,
and will be no matter what style it happens to
be. But to take offense is simply a symptom of
a lack of perspective.

I
have a mop made in Thailand. The brand is "Black
Man." I mop the floors in my house. I'm
the chief nigger. I'm not offended.

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